If someone takes "Little Red Riding Hood" and just changes the word "Red" wherever it shows up to "Green", then claims a copyright of some kind or another on it, and someone else changes every other word "Red" to "Green" (half red and half green), and the first person who thinks they hold a copyright tries to take the second person to court, I doubt they would succeed (certainly not if I were on the jury!) Just like changes to a legitimately copyrighted work must not be simply derivative of the original work for someone to claim a new copyright, doesn't the same rule apply to public domain works? In other words, for anyone to have any form of copyright hold on their derivations from public domain VistA, the changes would have to be sufficiently significant that it was clearly a new work (to the proverbial "reasonable person" as the courts like to refer to).
And by the way, it seems reasonable to be wrong for me to write code to a patent that I do not hold and try to distribute that as GPL. Likewise, if the person who holds the patent tries to collect some advantage by applying a GPL to their own patented code, they shouldn't be permitted to distribute such a tar-baby either. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Gregory Woodhouse Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 10:19 PM To: hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Hardhats-members] Re: CMS NEWS: ELECTRONIC HEALTH RECORD, SOFTWARE DELIVERED TO, PHYSICIAN OFFICES I assume that means software *other* than possibly modified versions of VistA. I still find the concept of trying to release a version of VistA under GPL troubling. Now, if WorldVistA were to develop a new pediatrics module, new HL7 infrastructure, new PM or billing software and release *that* under GPL... === Gregory Woodhouse [EMAIL PROTECTED] "One must shy away from questionable undertakings, even when they have a high sounding name." --Albert Einstein On Sep 21, 2005, at 9:56 PM, JohnLeo Zimmer wrote: > Unless I'm mistaken, CMS will eventually be unable to release it as > anything but FOIA, i.e. public domain. > > The CMS site used to say "public domain" but I cannot find that today. > > WorldVistA has chosen GLP for its own releases. > Hopefully there will be some of those, someday. ;-) ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php _______________________________________________ Hardhats-members mailing list Hardhats-members@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/hardhats-members
